Ruiz, J. G., MD, Mintzer, M. J., MD, & Leipzig, R. M., MD, PhD. (2006) discuss the learning processes required to succeed in medical school. As of late, medical schools have implemented e-learning into their programs, which require many hours of study to appropriately learn material. "While e-learning should not be a substitute, it greatly compliments the learning process. -Ruiz, J. G., MD, Mintzer, M. J., MD, & Leipzig, R. M., MD, PhD. (2006)

Question: When observing a friend shoot a basketball, and you're waiting your turn, you are given the ball and told to shoot but its your first time. After you shoot, the ball goes in and you're bamboozled as to how this happened. What type of learning was applied?

Answer: Latent learning, which occurs when there is a reason to do a task.

Question: What is positive reinforcement, and what is an example from your own life?

Answer: the addition of a reward following a behavior. An example of my personal life, would be earning money when mowing my parents yard without being asked.

An interesting TED talks about this can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXz2bcbivXw

Question: What is shaping, and what is its purpose when learning?

Answer: Shaping is the process where you are rewarded through small steps that lead to the end goal of learning an objective. Its purpose is to learn the process of systems in a learning objective one small portion at a time.

Swanberg, A. B. (2010) discusses the positive and negative effects of personality traits in her" article. This applies directly to operant conditioning because once we have displayed certain traits in the classroom, or not showing up to the classroom, we begin to see the effects of operant conditioning. Once our grades start to slip, we will most likely become aware and not skip anymore, thus proves operant learning. Swanberg, A. B. (2010) states that "that there is a correlation between conscientiousness and academics."

At WSU, you can learn more from operant learning at their lab, found at:

https://labs.wsu.edu/operant-conditioning/

This simple fact is well portrayed in Steffens, K. (2006) article about self imposed learning, and what it takes to be successful at it. The link between the two isn't necessarily observing, but rather observing and then applying what we have learned. Steffens, K. (2006) writes beautifully regarding the potential for learning simply from observing and applying TELE systems.

An additional resource and example of this can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIWd8Hx26A

Darling-Hammond, L., & Richardson, N. (2009) have explained this theory of observational learning well in their article, which explains teachers observing higher educators from test groups and their teaching methods. While observing it was said that "an understanding came for teaching effectively, but maybe not meeting learning standards." Darling-Hammond, L., & Richardson, N. (2009).

An example resource of this found at WSU can be located at,

https://opentext.wsu.edu/ldaffin/chapter/module-10-non-operant-procedures-respondent-conditioning-and-observational-learning/